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UTOPIA and SCIENCE FICTION in RAYMOND WILLIAMS Andrew Milner

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UTOPIA and SCIENCE FICTION in RAYMOND WILLIAMS Andrew Milner UTOPIA AND SCIENCE FICTION IN RAYMOND WILLIAMS Andrew Milner Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Monash University Wednesday 5 June 2002 This paper is a spin-off, a prequel perhaps, to my Re-Imagining Cultural Studies. It deals with material I finally chose to omit from the book - partly for reasons of space, partly to avoid too close an association between it and something so irreparably nerdish (anorakish in the British form) as science fiction or ‘SF’. Its title notwithstanding - that was Sage’s work, not mine - the book is actually about Raymond Williams. As it says in the blurb - my work, not Sage’s - it ‘traces the continuing influence on contemporary cultural studies of ... Williams, a theorist whose enduring and original work concerns the materiality of culture itself. The book seeks to restore Williams to a central position in the formation and development of cultural studies.’ Raymond Williams was, of course, a significant figure in late twentieth-century intellectual life, not only a pioneer in the early history of what we now know as Cultural Studies, but also a central inspiration for the early British New Left. He was variously - and inaccurately - likened to a British Lukács (Eagleton, 1976, p. 36), a British Bloch (Pinkney, 1989, pp. 28-31) and even ‘the British Sartre’ (The Times). Jürgen Habermas’s initial theorisation of the public sphere derived something from Williams’s Culture and Society (Habermas, 1989, p. 37); Stuart Hall, the Jamaican cultural theorist, cites Williams as ‘a major influence’ on his ‘intellectual and political formation’ (Hall, 1993, p. 349); Edward Said, the Palestinian postcolonial theorist, claims to have ‘learned so much from Raymond’ (Williams and Said, 1989, pp. 181, 192); Stephen Greenblatt, the guru of the New Historicism, recalls with enthusiasm the ‘critical subtlety and theoretical intelligence’ of Williams’s lectures at Cambridge (Greenblatt, 1990, p. 2); Cornel West, the most prominent contemporary exponent of Black Cultural Studies, describes Williams as ‘the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals’ (West, 1995, p. ix). There are Williamsites in Italy (Ferrara, 1989), in Brazil (Cevasco, 2000), even in Australia: not expatriate poms like me, but real Australians like Sylvia Lawson, whose How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia includes a wonderfully angry chapter on ‘How Raymond Williams Died in Australia’, organised around the fact that he died on the exact date of the White Australian bicentenary, January 26 1988, and that no Australian newspaper bothered to record his death (Lawson, 2002, pp. 33-65). None of these commentators seems to have made anything at all, however, of Williams’s enduring interest in SF. And nor did I in Re-Imagining Cultural Studies. But I will now. Let me begin by defining a few key terms, or at least borrowing a few definitions from Darko Suvin, Professor - Emeritus since 2000 - of Comparative Literature at McGill University in Montreal, Brecht scholar and co-founder of the journal Science Fiction Studies. In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Suvin famously defined SF as an ‘estranged’ genre, ‘distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional "novum" (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic’ (Suvin, 1979. p. 63). The point here was to distinguish SF both from naturalistic or ‘realist fiction’, which has no such novum, and from ‘fantasy’, where a novum is present, but nonetheless not validated by cognitive logic. Just as famously, but perhaps more controversially, Suvin described utopia as ‘the socio-political subgenre of science fiction’ (ibid., p. 61), in short, as social-science-fiction. The point here was to present SF as retrospectively ‘englobing’ earlier forms of utopia and dystopia. Whether we accept this or not, Suvin is surely right to define utopia as an ‘imaginary community ... in which human relations are organized more perfectly than in the author’s community’ (ibid., p. 45). His insistence on the comparative - ‘more perfectly, rather than ‘perfect’ - allows this definition to accommodate Saint-Simon, Wells and Morris as well as Bacon and Fénelon. There are indeed ‘perfect utopias, but these are only a limit case, a sub-class of the much wider species of merely more perfect worlds. Moreover, as we move from utopia to anti-utopia, or dystopia, there are only ever comparatives, since absolute imperfection appears to beggar both description and articulation. 1. Science Fiction and Left Culturalism In Re-Imagining Cultural Studies I argue that we can identify three main ‘phases’ in Williams’s thought, each explicable in terms of its own differentially negotiated settlement between Leavisite literary humanism and some version or another of Marxism, each characterisable in relation to a relatively distinct, consecutive moment in the history of the British New Left. The first such phase is the moment of ‘1956’ (the year of the Hungarian Revolution and the Anglo- French invasion of Egypt) and the foundation of the ‘first New Left’, in which Williams addressed himself to the definition of a third position, a peculiarly British ‘left culturalism’, combining Leavisite aesthetics with socialist politics. His key texts from this period were Culture and Society 1780-1950 and The Long Revolution. Though not his first book, Williams’s intellectual and political reputation was first established by Culture and Society. As his biographer, Fred Inglis, observes, it was one of the two ‘sacred texts of this ... new political movement’ (Inglis, 1995, p. 157). Utopia and dystopia figured prominently in the preoccupations of the first British New Left. For the ex-Communist intellectuals associated with The New Reasoner, the key theoretical problem was the legacy of Stalinist Marxism, one possible solution the recovery of older utopian socialist traditions. For E.P. Thompson, the historian whose first major work had been a biography of William Morris, this had meant a return to Romanticism, to poetry and to News from Nowhere (Thompson, 1955). For many of the younger radicals intrigued by the new popular culture and appalled by Cold War and the threat of nuclear warfare, both George Orwell and his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, seemed to offer a more directly contemporary alternative to Stalinism. As Williams would later recall: the ‘New Left respected Orwell directly, especially in its early years’ (Williams, 1971, p. 87). One might expect Culture and Society to echo something of this interest in Morris or in Orwell. And, to some extent, it did. The book is organised into two main parts, dealing respectively with the years 1790 to 1870 and 1914 to 1950, linked by a less substantial treatment of the turn-of- the-century ‘Interregnum’, which clearly failed to engage Williams (Williams, 1963, p. 165). Each of the main parts concluded with a discussion of political writing, the first with Morris, the second with Orwell. But neither News from Nowhere nor Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared to excited Williams’s interest or sympathy. He saw Morris’s significance in the attempt to attach the general values of the ‘culture and society’ tradition to ‘an actual and growing social force: that of the organized working class’ (ibid., p. 153). But this is more evident in the expressly political essays, he argued, such as How we Live, and How we might Live or A Factory as it might be, than in the utopian novel, where the weaknesses ‘are active and disabling’ (ibid., p. 159). As for Orwell, if the man had been ‘brave, generous, frank, and good’ (ibid., p. 284), his dystopia nonetheless fully replicated that very minority culture/mass civilization topos which had propelled Williams away from T.S. Eliot and the Leavises. ‘Orwell puts the case in these terms’, Williams concluded, ‘because this is how he really saw present society, and Nineteen Eighty-Four is desperate because Orwell recognized that on such a construction the exile could not win, and then there was no hope at all’ (ibid., p. 283). Hence, the paradox of ‘a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualized a distinctive squalor’ (ibid., p. 277). This lack of sympathy for Morris’s more explicitly utopian writings and for Orwell’s more explicitly dystopian had been prefigured in a little-known essay Williams published two years previously in The Highway, the journal of the British Workers’ Educational Association. The occasion was a critical review of recent SF, entitled simply ‘Science Fiction’, which to my knowledge has only been republished on one subsequent occasion, in Science Fiction Studies shortly after Williams’s death. As Patrick Parrinder explained in his introduction to this 1988 republication, the essay combined ‘an ideological critique of the genre with some pithily individual observations and an avid curiosity about SF’ (Williams, 1988, p. 356). Williams argued that stories of ‘a secular paradise of the future’ had ‘reached their peak’ in Morris and that thereafter they had been ‘almost entirely converted into their opposites: the stories of a future secular hell’ (ibid., p. 357). The ‘ideological critique’ was directed, in particular, at the recent corruption - literally, the putrefaction - of Morris’s utopianism. Its immediate target is presented by three ‘putropian’ novels: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Here Williams distinguished three main types of contemporary literary SF, which he termed respectively ‘Putropia, Doomsday, and Space Anthropology’ (ibid., p. 357). By the first, he meant simply dystopian SF of the kind exemplified by Huxley, Orwell and Bradbury, and Zamyatin’s We; by the second, the kind of fictional catastrophe in which human life itself is extinguished, as in van Vogt’s Dormant, Latham’s The Xi Effect, Christopher’s The New Wine and almost, but not quite, Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids; by the third, ‘stories ..
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